Civic Virtue

No Suella Braverman to answer the Urgent Question on immigration. No Braverman on the airwaves. What is the point of her? What is she for? How much longer can she last?

As for 10 million people born abroad, that meant Cliff Richard until he decamped to the Republic of Barbados. It means Boris Johnson. It means Daniel Hannan. It means Peter Hitchens. It means me.

Britain has a long, recent, and arguably ongoing imperial history. It was in the EU for two generations. It is mercantile. De Gaulle was right to call us "maritime", but not to call us "insular". Citizens of countries that were in the French Empire when he said that now have the vote in Britain as citizens of the Commonwealth.

Almost no other country allows any category of non-citizen to vote. In Britain, an Irish or Commonwealth citizen could in principle become Prime Minister. In the United States, you cannot become President unless you were born there.

That said, I should be surprised if anyone still were sitting in the House of Commons for an English, Scottish or Welsh seat without being a British citizen, or for a Northern Irish seat without being British or Irish. That may now be an open goal for rivals to be First Past the Post.

So require parliamentary candidates to be British citizens in Great Britain, or British or Irish citizens in Northern Ireland. But let everyone vote. We already enfranchise the Commonwealth citizens of Rwanda, Mozambique, Gabon and Togo, none of which was ever in the British Empire. Why let a Gabonese or a Togolese vote, but not an American or an Israeli?

Imagine suggesting in the United States or in Israel that any non-citizen should have the vote. National Conservatives have picked the wrong laboratory here in the land of Akshata Murty's husband. But why should she be enfranchised here when, presumably, Lucia Guo is not, and certainly was not when she first lived here?

Extending suffrage to citizens of countries with which we had a connection is so British that it is positively Burkean, like the National Health Service. And Britain is now globally noted for its  superdiversity, a so far unique combination of having people from every inhabited territory on earth, of having some level of ethnic diversity down to every neighbourhood and village, and of having a huge and exponentially increasing mixed-race population in the society that accepted mixed-race people and couples more than anywhere else.

None of this is about reversing Brexit, which is happening all on its own. The installation of a Government that revered the memory of Margaret Thatcher, rather than that of Tony Benn, is having its inevitable and intentional effect. Theresa May and Liz Truss campaigned for Remain. Johnson famously wrote an article on each side. If you believe that Rishi Sunak voted Leave, then you will believe absolutely anything, even that Benn's Vicar on Earth voted Remain. Far from Brexit's lasting until those of us in our forties were dead, it is not even going to last until we had retired. Nowhere near, in fact.

But when I tell you that there is going to be a hung Parliament, then you can take that to the bank. I spent the 2005 Parliament saying that it was psephologically impossible for the Heir to Blair's Conservative Party to win an overall majority. I predicted a hung Parliament on the day that the 2017 General Election was called, and I stuck to that, entirely alone, all the way up to the publication of the exit poll eight long weeks later. And on the day that Sunak became Prime Minister, I predicted that a General Election between him and Keir Starmer would result in a hung Parliament.

To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.